Richard Bausch Quotes

Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

'A Passage To India' by E. M. Forster - It opened my mind to a world I'd never known before.

The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.

Wrestling is an art. Every culture has an art, like music and dancing and fighting. So that's my base. If I think about it like art, I can connect with everybody.

Traveling is an experience that you can always carry with you. It makes the world come together more so we understand each other better.

My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.

I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children.

Culture is this thing that we can exchange among ourselves as human beings to knock aside our differences and build upon our similarities. Cultural exchange is the ultimate exchange.

Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery.

I'm a fanatic about Irish music. I love its moody, modal and timeless quality. I'm different from some other composers, because I don't look at this as just a job. I think of music as art.

All the arts, music, the visual arts, acting and dancing arts, cooking arts, and I believe sports, will save the human race because they can leap over barriers, religions, leap over barriers of race, politics.

Art is never the voice of a country, it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.

I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.

Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls, and through those holes we can get a glimpse of the other and sometimes even like what we see.

The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western Culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.

I have a large number of enthusiastic admirers of my art. And they all sing a hymn in praise from the bottom of their hearts for my art.

You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do every thing they can to assist you in this wise intention.

Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.

Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized right now. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into, the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go this deep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnotic blah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself. Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's because it's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the people it's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seems a little easy to me.

Poetry is not the record of an event: it is an event.

Art is excitement which if we can't create ourselves, we can at least, through love of it, make available to others.